Mature content ahead... "It's difficult to imagine Sherman Alexie as a tiny infant, fragile and vulnerable on the operating table in the shadow of a dire prognosis, although that's where his life story began. He was born with hydrocephalus—water on the brain—and after a complex and risky brain operation at 6 months old, doctors believed he wouldn't survive. Four decades later, nothing about him seems weak. He is tall and broad and seems made of denser material than everybody else. And he's loud. When he laughs, he throws his head back and you can almost see the happy noise emanating outward in concentric circles. Other people in Coastal Kitchen look up from their salads and soups when he talks excitedly about masturbation or how one of his characters, a young Indian girl, "cuts off a cowboy soldier's dick" and sticks it in the soldier's mouth. Sherman Alexie commands a lot of space and attention. "I wasn't funny to begin with," he says. "In the early poetry, the funny was accidental because the poems were about rage. But it was when I started to write fiction that I had people talking to each other, and the way Indians talk to each other is as a series of dirty jokes." Most comic authors know you have to make someone laugh before you make them cry, but most comic authors don't dig as deeply as Alexie does. His humor comes from alcoholic Indians and genocide and the raw deals that have been handed out like candy in this country since white folks first landed here. Though he wanted to be a doctor when he started school at Washington State University in Spokane, Alexie quickly discovered his aptitude for writing, and he set about consciously learning how to write like (and act like) a real writer: His teacher, the poet Alex Kuo, taught students "how to live a writer's life" by making them read their work aloud at open mics in Spokane. Alexie worked as an assistant for WSU's reading series, often playing host to (and carefully observing) visiting authors. "Carolyn Kizer was in Spokane," he says. "I drove her around and she taught me a lot in one day about being a writer. She's this regal, formalist poet, and she said to me: 'Don't fuck groupies.'"" Get the Story:
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